“Will you let me try something rather wicked?”
“I have one hand, and it’s holding a beer. How can I stop you?”
She took the beer from him and made him lie down on his back. In the mirror, he watched her take up a crouching position with her hips over his left shoulder and her torso reversed to his, putting her head over his loins. “Raise it to me, Apollo.” The plea, muffled by his hardening penis, came with a straining of her right hip against his cheek and a searching swivel and thrust of her pelvis. The stump of his arm rose to meet her and it was an incredible sensation, for the “ghost” of his severed arm was still with him and it was as if that arm were plunged through the warm sheath of her body, from womb to throat, and its prehensile hand were urging her bobbing head to its task.
When she was finished, she rolled from him and lay curled and quietly sobbing into the carpet.
She ran a bath for him and made coffee while he dressed. And he was glad they were able to sit and chat awhile, side by side on the sitting-room sofa, before he left, for he had triumphed through her and now owed her a debt transcending the bond of flesh.
“You promised to tell me about your session with the Fuehrer this afternoon.”
“I’m doing better than that. I’m giving you my complete notes to type out on Monday.”
“Not those, silly! I mean . . . things.”
“Things?”
“Things of interest. How did he look? Was he in a good mood? What room did you work in?”
“In his private study, upstairs.”
Her eyes widened as she drew her legs up, all attention, like a small girl at the start of a fairy story. “What is it like?”
“Workmanlike. Unpretentious. A fine view over the Chancellery gardens.” He settled down, resting his head against the back of the sofa. “There’s a portrait in oils on one of the walls—an attractive young girl with long blond hair, like yours. Would that be Eva Braun?”
Helga shook her head. “Fräulein Junge told us about that. It’s a painting of his niece, Geli Raubal, who shot herself in 1931 at the age of twenty-three. They say the Fuehrer was deeply in love with her. But go on, Kurt, what else?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Most of the time I was concentrating too hard on what he was saying to have eyes for anything else. He sometimes speaks very quickly, I can tell you, and my shorthand’s not as fast as yours.”
“Just to think,” she sighed, her blue eyes sparkling, “all alone with the Fuehrer in his private study for nearly an hour! I’d have melted completely away!”
“Maybe it would have been the Fuehrer who melted.” He reached his hand out to stroke the curve of her thigh through the decorously draped skirt of her housecoat. “Have you never been alone with him, then?”
Again, the headshake. “But once, when I was on stand-by duty with the night shift, I was invited to join the Fuehrer’s guests in the drawing room, after dinner of course. It was marvelous! Doctor Goebbels was there, and Professor Speer—as he was then—and Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich, God rest his soul. The Fuehrer spoke to us until nearly two in the morning, and it was terrific! There’s absolutely nothing he doesn’t know about.”
“Can you remember anything particular he said that night?”
“Oh, Kurt, how can I remember? He talked about everything—the old days in Munich, the works of Wagner, his plans for rebuilding Berlin. You know how it is—when the Fuehrer’s speaking, you get so enthralled by the magic of his personality that time seems to fly, and afterward you can hardly remember what he was talking about.”
He said, dryly, “I’m glad you’re not doing my job. You’d have been fired by now.”
“You mean you’re not spellbound when the Fuehrer speaks?” The leg under his caressing hand had gone rigid and she was staring at him with something bordering on hostility.
“Can’t afford the luxury, sweetheart, not with a book to get together. Which reminds me—” he glanced at his wrist watch—“I have a date with the Chancellery librarian at eight in the morning.”
“How about the evening? I’ll fix dinner again, if you like.”
He would like. But he was not a free agent. He said, “I’ll have to check with Fräulein Junge when she comes on at six.” And then, with all the hubris of his newfound masculinity, “Keep something hot for me, just in case.”
She came in on cue, grabbing at his hand and pressing it to her.
“There’ll always be something hot for you here, my Paros Apollo.”
CHAPTER THREE
IT HAD been Adolf Hitler’s intention to make the triumphant journey to Athens in his own armored train, stopping en route at Prague, at his Austrian home town, Linz, then at Budapest, Belgrade, Salonika and finally Athens. The journey of over fifteen hundred miles would have been the longest he had yet made by land through the nations now integrated, through conquest or puppet alliance, into the New Order.
But it seemed that the Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler had put his jackboot firmly down. To Kurt, snapping to attention as the slight figure with the weak chin and drooping shoulders strutted back across the anteroom where Kurt was awaiting the Fuehrer’s pleasure, it was obvious that Himmler—incongruously dressed, on this occasion, in the green uniform of the Waffen SS—had had his way about something, for his very spectacles seemed to be glinting with triumph and there was almost a jauntiness in his acknowledgment of the SS bodyguards’ salute.
When Kurt was finally admitted to the Fuehrer’s presence, Hitler’s first words explained Himmler’s cockiness.
“It’s a great pity, Armbrecht. I had set aside time for a good long session with you during the train journey to Athens, but Himmler now insists I should go by air, and my own security chief Rattenhuber agrees with him. I argued with them of course. But if one puts a man in charge of one’s security, one must finally bow to his considered judgments.”
“May I ask, my Fuehrer, why the Reichsfuehrer objects to the train journey?”
“Too dangerous. We would not only be passing through the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where Heydrich was murdered, but through Yugoslavia, where Tito’s so-called partisan army has still to be crushed. Unless we line our entire route through these territories with loyal troops—a practical impossibility—we risk a derailing of the train by saboteurs in the pay of Churchill and Stalin.” Hitler was pacing up and down as he spoke, making curiously uncoordinated gestures with his hands. “I must admit, Armbrecht, to some impatience with this excessive concern for my safety. If Providence—for which you may substitute ‘the Almighty,’ if you prefer—had disapproved of my historic mission in Europe, any one of a whole series of plots to destroy me might well have succeeded. But what in fact has happened? In every instance when my life was in jeopardy there has been a last-minute, almost uncanny frustration of the assassin’s carefully laid plans. Bormann, who is not a very religious man, is convinced that I am under some form of divine protection. A few years ago, I would have dismissed this as superstitious claptrap, but today I am not so skeptical. I tell you, Armbrecht, I now have an absolute inner conviction that my life will be spared until the task to which it is dedicated is completed.”
“Every German will say ‘Amen’ to that, my Fuehrer.” Kurt’s deeply felt response filled the brief silence as Hitler paused by the window, tilting his face to the afternoon sun. When he turned to face Kurt again, he was smiling.
“Do you still say your prayers, Captain?”
“Not in any conventional way, my Fuehrer. Like yourself, I was brought up as a Catholic and I suppose I still believe in a God. But I stopped going to Mass shortly after I joined the Party.”
Hitler was nodding in evident sympathy. “There is no common ground,” he said, resuming his pacing, “between the philosophy of National Socialism and the preposterous doctrines of the Christian churches. On the one hand, you have a movement whose dynamic stems from the natural laws governing racial purity, the leadership principle and the survival of the strongest. On the
other, the disgusting theological excretion of sick brains, obstructing the evolution of an elite with its humanitarian rubbish about all men being equal in the sight of God. Armbrecht, my final task will be to solve the religious problem.”
Kurt was scribbling rapidly, but managing at the same time to raise his head whenever he sensed Hitler’s eyes on him. “Does that mean, my Fuehrer,” he ventured, “that there will be no place for organized religion in the New Order?”
“Not necessarily. There is a sense in which the Church, despite its absurd doctrines, can never be replaced in the minds of the masses by a party ideology. Indeed, I can find no fault with the conservative, stabilizing influence it wields over the people. What we must do is eliminate the poison from the Christian ethic by encouraging the Church to adapt to the goals of National Socialism. Through this process, the Church has the possibility of revitalizing itself and surviving. If, on the other hand, it should decide to resist the process, then it will become an historical irrelevancy and will undoubtedly perish.”
Kurt returned at once to his office when the session ended, to find Helga sitting at her typewriter, fingers poised high above the keyboard in an exaggerated pose of starter-tape readiness.
“Relax, Maedel. I’ll be five minutes—” he waved his notebook—“straightening this lot out.”
“And another hour straightening yourself out, if you don’t stop addressing me in that vulgar Bavarian way!”
“The girls in Munich never object. And as everyone knows—”
“Yes, yes!” She made a long-suffering face. “They’re the prettiest girls in the whole of the Reich. Why don’t you go back there and organize yourself a whole harem of beer-swilling Maedels?”
Their banter was one of the fruits of a month-long intimacy. It was also—to Kurt certainly and, he suspected, to Helga herself—a kind of safety-valve against a mutual dependence that neither of them wanted and all their wiser instincts rejected. But wisdom, at its best, could be a feeble arbiter over the uneasy borderline between sexual harmony and the heart’s needs, and he was challenging it now, with his retort.
“As a matter of fact, that’s just what I’m going to do—go back to Munich, I mean.”
From its deadpan expression her face now flickered into a strained and insecure smile. “How nice for you! You want me to help pack your Lederhosen?”
“I’m not joking, Helga. The Fuehrer will be flying to Athens instead of taking his train, and he has very thoughtfully given me four days’ leave to spend with my family.”
“Oh? And when will that be?”
“The date’s still a secret. But I gather from Major Kremer that a battalion of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler has already left for Athens, so it can’t be far ahead.”
She was silent for a while, brushing her fingertips lightly over the keys of the typewriter. Then: “You’ve never told me—do you have a girl friend, down there in Munich?”
“A girl friend? Half a dozen, my little mouse!”
“How lovely! . . . Well, all I can say is, take care you spread your favors evenly over those four nights. I don’t want you coming back to Berlin with your eyes scratched out.”
Four nights later, as they lay side by side in bed, smoking a final cigarette, Kurt could sense the sadness in her, and he was disconcerted by his inability—or was it reluctance?—to connect.
“One thing I’m relieved about,” he murmured. “Can you imagine, hours with the Fuehrer in that train, without being able to light up a cigarette?”
Helga gave a little grunt. “They say,” she answered in a small spiritless voice, “Reichsfuehrer Himmler’s even stricter about smoking.”
She fell silent again, her head lightly supported by the ball of his left shoulder. He was thinking, I’m not tired of her yet, and she has made a man of me again, but now she wants me to give her something in return—a word, a commitment—and it’s not in me. Not yet. He said, “I was pulling your leg about the girl friends in Munich, Helga. If I take anyone out at night it’ll be my sister.”
Her slim white arm groped for the ashtray on her side of the bed. She rolled over and put her lips to the tapered stub of his arm, making little clicking noises as she nuzzled and kissed the puckered seam. “I don’t mind how much fun you have in Munich,” her voice came up shakily. “But this you keep exclusively for Helga. Promise?”
A seat was found for him on one of the Chancellery planes—a refitted Heinkel bomber—bound for Munich the next day, thereby sparing him the tedious eight-hour train journey from Berlin to the Bavarian capital. And Sophie, driving the family’s old Adler (on the last two gallons of this month’s gasoline ration), was at the airport to meet him. There was a blustery wind blowing down from the Alps but the early August sun was shining and the air was several degrees warmer than it had been at Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield that morning.
Kurt wasn’t the only tall blond man in gray army uniform on view in the Arrivals lounge, but he was the only one at that moment with an empty left sleeve and the Ritterkreuz at his throat, and he had hardly made his appearance when a slim red-headed girl in a green sweater and brown pleated skirt came at him, full-tilt, out of a loose knot of waiting civilians.
“Kurt! Oh, my brother dear—welcome home!” He barely had time to drop his valise before she was inside his encircling arm, hugging him tight. He eased away, laughing.
“Sophie! You look wonderful!”
And she did, with her wide shining green eyes and tilted nose and ripe lips slashing the freckled oval of her face. It seemed to Kurt at once an age, and also a bare moment, since that decorous, solemn embrace, seven weeks ago, on the railway platform before he climbed onto the train for Berlin.
“Let me take your valise.”
“Nonsense, Maedel. What do you take me for—an old woman?”
The excited questions flew at him almost nonstop during the short drive from the airport.
“What’s he like, the Fuehrer? I mean, is he friendly and relaxed with you or does he keep you at a distance?”
“We’re the best of chums. He calls me Kurt and I call him Adolf. We have daily wrestling matches on the Chancellery lawn.”
“Liar! Have you met Eva Braun yet? And don’t tell me you wrestle with her, too!”
“I think the Fuehrer’s keeping her away from me. She stays upstairs in his private apartment and I haven’t even caught a glimpse of her yet. But she must have seen me, because I keep getting these billets-doux from her.”
“Double liar! How about Doctor Goebbels? No—you wrote to us about that. Goering! Have you met him?”
“I passed him once, on his way to a Fuehrer Conference. It wasn’t easy, I mean passing him.” He curved his arm out, describing an exaggerated waistline. “I was almost skinned raw by his medals.”
“Oh, Kurt—her hand left the wheel and gave his arm a tight squeeze—“it’s such fun to have you back! Can’t you really stay any longer?”
“I was lucky to get these four days, Sophie. But maybe, after the Fuehrer gets back from Athens, he’ll move headquarters to the Berghof. Think of it, only a three-hour train journey from Munich!”
“How marvelous! Oh, by the way, none of my friends will believe he wears spectacles.”
“What are you trying to do, have me shot? I’m going to have to be damned careful what I write to you in the future.”
“That’s just what Mother said you’d say. All right, big brother—” she crossed herself, solemnly—“I won’t pass on any more state secrets.”
“And how is Mother? And the Old Man?”
“Both fine. They’re taking us out to dinner tonight, to Humplmayr’s to celebrate. And there’ll be champagne for lunch—the real thing, from France.”
“How did they get hold of that—a bribe from one of Father’s students?”
“Idiot! Can you imagine Daddy taking bribes? You remember Herr Berchem, the locomotive engineer who lives at the top of our road? Well, he’s now taking a train to Paris twice a week,
and if you give him some sausages, or semolina flour—anything that’s edible—he’ll come back with French champagne or cognac. He makes a profit of course. And one has to be a bit discreet about it.”
Kurt shook his head, chuckling. “You’re making me nervous. What have I come back to—a den of black marketeers?”
“Everyone’s been doing it. But you know Daddy—it took the return of the prodigal to make him unbend and have a quiet word with Herr Berchem. It’s the same thing with these Russian domestic servants. He’s entitled to one Ukrainian girl, to take the rough housework off Mother. But not a bit of it! ‘We’ll have no slave labor in this house,’ he says.” Sophie gave a little sigh. “I must say I sympathize with him. The way some German women treat their wretched Ukrainians!”
“Pretty badly?”
“Like dogs. I know they’re not supposed to be given any free time, or allowed to go out to church or anything like that. But you are supposed to feed them something, a couple of times a day. Take that horrible Frau Krenkler, who lives next door. She was one of the first to get a Ukrainian, on account of her husband being the local branch leader of the Party. She worked her first girl literally to death! From dawn to midnight, practically —with hardly a break and without a proper meal ever being put in front of her. We know that because we used to see the poor thing rummaging through the garbage bin, searching for scraps. Mother and I would smuggle her a bit of something over the garden wall when Frau Krenkler wasn’t around, but mostly she was existing on garbage too foul even for the pig bin. Then she died and they took her away, and the very next day another Ukrainian girl was delivered to the Krenklers.”
“Is she being treated any better?”
“Worse, if anything. She’s younger and quite pretty, and Herr Krenkler must have shown he fancied her, or something, because now she’s locked in the toolshed before he comes home in the evening, and she has to stay there all night.”
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